Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @07:12AM
from the not-that-you-should-buy-a-phone-for-its-benchmarks dept.

A recent forum post at Beyond3D made an interesting claim: that the Samsung Galaxy S4's GPU ran at 532 MHz for certain whitelisted benchmark applications, and at 480 MHz for everything else. The folks at AnandTech decided to investigate and found out that the phone does indeed let its GPU run at a higher frequency when particular benchmark software is running. They found a similar oddity with the CPU — it wasn't restricted for other apps, but it was forced to run at max speed during benchmarks. Then they decided to look for direct evidence that this was intentional.
"Poking around I came across the application changing the DVFS behavior to allow these frequency changes – TwDVFSApp.apk. Opening the file in a hex editor and looking at strings inside (or just running strings on the .odex file) pointed at what appeared to be hard coded profiles/exceptions for certain applications. The string 'BenchmarkBooster' is a particularly telling one. ... Quadrant standard, advanced, and professional, linpack (free, not paid), Benchmark Pi, and AnTuTu are all called out specifically. Nothing for GLBenchmark 2.5.1 though, despite its similar behavior."

When every sixth topic on Slashdot is about the evils and perils of Government Regulation, why are we constantly seeing examples of companies misleading, blatantly lying, to their customers? We need more teeth on consumer regulation. I bought my Samsung Galaxy S4 on certain assumptions of power. Remember Hyundai blatantly lying about their fuel numbers for half a decade? They were doled out a punishment, but the boost in sales due to in part by their chain-wide efficiency offset any net losses.

Slashdot readers will remember this, and probably choose an S4 when faced with so few choices. Samsung sees no benefit to not skewing numbers in the future.

No, they don't. There is a difference between optimizing a system and overclocking just for specific benchmark apps. Samsung could get fraud charges on this one if they advertised or published the benchmarked speed. It is less obvious if they did not do the publishing themselves.

Arguments about whether "more regulation" is good or bad are in my experience almost always misguided. We need better regulation, but that is much harder to define, and doesn't make for as good a soundbite.

No different than how Samsung made tons of commercials poking fun of iPhone users. If you make a better product just show the product. If you make an inferior product then take cheap shots at the competition.

That's because the app has to tell the phone to stop saving battery and start performing at it's most optimal speed and the danger is that if the benchmark apps aren't built to do this then the benchmark apps will only give a benchmark for the phones power saving mode rather than at it's optimal performance.

There's no overclocking going on, the GPU is rated for 533mhz so running at 532mhz in that configuration isn't any kind of fudge but a genuine representation of how the phone can perform at peak.

I don't think we need to celebrate benchmarking phones, period. This was one of those flamebait trolling things that happened in the PC era where people boasted how superficially fast their beloved shoebox was by putting $10k worth of equipment into and liquid cooling it just to get some high number result in 3D Mark or some other meaningless program.

We don't need this for phones.

Yes phones play games, yes phones are getting faster, but realize that phones and tablets are a HUGE step back from the PC era in terms of performance so benchmarking them means you may as well drag out your dusty Pentium era PC and start boasting about good its benchmark numbers are.

Also when 80% of the apps on the Android platform are unstable POS then I don't care about how fast they crash. Even Chrome quits unexpectedly repeatedly and this is by the company that makes the Android platform on their own Nexus brand devices.

Wow. Did you even read the article. Or even the summary? They aren't doing this to ensure the device isn't running in power saving mode. The enhanced frequency is _ONLY_ available to benchmark tests. The code even refers to it as BenchmarkBooster. What do you possibly think BenchmarkBooster does?

Part of that is that unlike his predecessor (Stringer) - Hirai realizes that treating your customers like shit is bad for business.

Sony under Hirai is very different from Sony under Stringer - this is most obvious if you look at Sony Mobile, who are one of the largest contributors to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and the only manufacturer that actively maintains AOSP builds for some of their devices. There are numerous signs that, rather than squash the anomalous behavior of the former Sony-Ericsson, the rest of Sony is starting to adopt Mobile's ways.

If no apps other then the benchmarker run at 533Mhz, then overclocking is a fair word even if the CPU is rated for 533Mhz. If even 20% of the apps were allowed to run at 533Mhz then I would say otherwise, but NONE of the other apps are allowed to run at 533Mhz, just the benchmarker.

Everyone is holding these guys up to be some kind of saints in their battle against the evil Apple Empire, when they are thrice-convicted price fixers that screw their customers over at every opportunity, legal or otherwise; and try to screw the competition by suing over standards-essential patents that they don't license for FRAND terms (allegedly).

Samsung is not a friendly company, but I'll likely be modded down for saying so. Whatever, I've got the karma to burn.